Welcome to the second installment of our Agents of SHIELD podcast – Podcast of SHIELD! While we spoke about the pilot already in our first episode, now that everyone’s seen the episode we can dig in to some details and spoilers.

Listen in as we talk about the Agents of SHIELD pilot and keep reading for some more info that we couldn’t fit in or that landed on the editing room floor, so to speak.

Listen:

Remaining Agents of SHIELD odds & ends:

Ratings. When we recorded this last night, the ratings weren’t available yet. But it looks like it’s good news for the show and ABC – it scored a 4.7 rating with adults 18-49, with While it didn’t exactly break any records, this marked the best new drama debut since 2009. The last show to perform as well was ABC’s V, which soon fizzled and rapidly lost viewers. Hopefully, Agents of SHIELD doesn’t suffer that same fate but given that word of mouth and critical response is optimistically positive about what the season can hold.

It’ll be interesting to see how time-shifted viewing comes in to play on the perceived success of this series. Because its fans will skew younger, there’s a big possibility for L+3 and L+7 gains (L+3 is number of people viewing live and on DVR 3 days after air, L+7 is that audience as well as viewers 7 days after air) as well as fans watching on Hulu, ABC.com and their apps.

Its Potential. I touched on this towards the end of the episode, but feel like it needs to be stressed given the way fandom tends to react only on the polar extremes of things. This is a pilot. Pilots are not the same as movies, they can’t fit everything in and answer every question in a single episode. I’ve seen some fans complain about Coulson being alive and them not explaining it. To answer that question now goes against television fundamentals. Pilots exist mostly as a means to get networks and fans interested in where this show is going, so to answer one of the big mysteries in the first 20 minutes would have left the show puttering about with no direction to keep moving in in episodes 2, 5, 10, and beyond.

The weak links. Despite what I just said above about judging it for its potential, there was one weak link for me that will need to be worked on: Agent Ward. He’s as close to the center as possible without actually being Coulson and he’s bland as can be. Hopefully the actor will be able to get more comfortable in the role and have some fun with it, but right now I can chalk most of it up to his newbie status. They cast some unknowns, so hopefully they’ll get more in to their parts as the episodes progress. And while I liked Fitz & Simmons, I can understand why fans don’t want them to take up too much time in the series. They’re the Qs in this scenario and focusing too much on them brings in the comparisons to many other crime procedurals like Bones, CSI, and the like.

So what did you think of the pilot episode? Will you be tuning in next week? If not, we’d love to know why! Sound off in the comments.